As a market leading provider of innovative software solutions for Real Estate and Facility Management, Planon has opened up its software platform. This allows organisations to maximise the benefits from the diversity of property technology (PropTech) as present across their portfolio. And most importantly, retain a single pane of glass on a portfolio level in a varied and dispersed landscape of fast-growing technology and digitalisation opportunities.
In today’s reality, almost every building is equipped with a specific variety of smart building technologies and IT infrastructures. The extremely fast evolving PropTech market is increasing this diversity and variety of technology even further. Not just in a single building but especially on a real estate portfolio, site or campus level.
Although use and business cases of individual technologies are attractive and beneficial, this trend also triggers additional complexity:
To enable cost efficient, scalable and value-focused digitalisation in Corporate Real Estate and Facility Management, the Planon Platform offers a series of unique capabilities that make it a true open application platform: open to other systems, enabling the development of additional capabilities by others with integrated IoT features.
The Planon Platform allows a seamless ‘fit in’ of property technology that is already available within buildings or that is preferred by building users or operators. This allows organisations to take maximum advantage of market innovations and eventual specific local or regional technology preferences. Most importantly, the Planon Platform provides the tools that allow organisations to deal with this complexity in an easy, cost efficient, scalable and manageable way.
Planon solutions are unique through their focus on CRE and FM business process that deliver tangible benefits in areas like compliance, efficiency, productivity and sustainability. As well as the toolsets to easily connect PropTech, the Planon Platform also provides the tools to seamlessly embed these technologies in the business processes and workflows as supported by the Planon solutions. This creates tremendous new value opportunities in better and faster real-world business responses through decision automation. And enhanced portfolio decision making through a single pane of glass.
With the Planon Platform organisations can gain maximum benefit from today’s and tomorrow’s technology innovations in buildings and the workplace, continuously innovate through a freedom of choice, strongly reduce integration costs and efforts, and retain a single source of truth with harmonised business processes.
The Planon Platform offers an extensive toolset to set up and configure Planon solutions, business processes, workflows, authorisations, catalogues etc. To connect 3rd party products and property technology, the Planon Platform offers multiple integration tools like REST API, a state-of-the-art, flexible, and easy way to integrate applications. To embed these 3rd party products in the business processes as supported by Planon solutions, the Planon Platform offers a decision engine to configure decision automation and to add specific business logic and actions to events.
For Planon partners or Planon customers that like to extend the existing Planon functionality with new applications (apps), the Planon Platform includes a fully integrated AppBuilder to develop, test and deploy new apps in an easy and scalable way. The AppBuilder reduces software development efforts and throughout times and provides programmers with a programming environment that offers them better access to the existing Planon software objects and the toolsets mentioned above. In IT, this is commonly known as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). By facilitating programming, offering testing facilities, and making deployment of apps very simple, a programmer’s life becomes much easier, resulting in faster development of better solutions and lower cost-of-ownership.
'With the Planon Platform organisations can gain maximum benefit from today's and tomorrow's technology innovations in buildings and the workplace, reduce integration costs and efforts, and retain a single source of truth with harmonised business processes.'
The sudden rise in remote working and digitisation means we now have far less real-life communication and collaboration. Consequently, we have less real-life connections with people and miss out on nonverbal communication. Therefore we lack an essential element to understand the importance of a situation, to manage expectations or improve satisfaction. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help to determine nonverbal aspects in a remote and highly digitised world by detecting people’s mood and emotion through analysing for example their email or voice message.
For a Facility Management Service Desk such AI technology can help to analyse the mood of a requestor. Based on that mood, it can determine the right priority, the right response or the right feedback. This enables teams to do the right things to keep customers happy and to identify improvements for services. Ultimately, organisations gain new valuable insights about interrelations between for example people’s mood versus workplace utilisation, indoor climate settings, or building preferences.
Its open architecture lets the Planon Platform connect with any AI technology. Moreover, it allows organisations to embed this technology in the Planon business processes, like the aforementioned Service Desk. Once a customer enters a request, the input is immediately sent to the AI technology and the result is fed back into the request in real-time. The Service Desk operator sees immediately, for example by coloured emoticons, the customer’s mood. Automated and configurable workflows ensure the right response to the request. And finally, BI and analytics allow you to strategise the new insights you gain.
Smart building platforms, like Schneider Electric Building Advisor, systematically monitor the behaviour of building control and climate installations by extracting parameter data and analysing this data to detect anomalies. Systems might be wasting energy (energy), assets in the infrastructure might be bound to fail (maintenance), or the building infrastructure does not provide the required environmental conditions (comfort).
With its integration tools, the Planon Platform automatically transfers these anomalies into diagnostics that describe what is wrong and provide insight on how to remedy the situation. Based on configurable decision rules these diagnostics are automatically assessed and relevant interventions are generated and processed through the applicable Planon Solution - like generating workorders, checking budgets, assessing portfolio priorities, sending alerts etc. This enables you to create portfolios of smart buildings and drives immediate action on intelligence that is derived from these smart buildings.
Its open architecture means that the Planon Platform can connect with any smart building platform or technology. Moreover, it allows organisations to embed this technology in the Planon business processes, like the aforementioned workorder- or budget- or portfolio management. This helps your organisation to drastically reduce building operating costs, increase the value of assets throughout their lifecycle, improve your building sustainability profiles, and enhance workplace experience for occupants.
Organisations must be empowered to respond to new challenges. In this blog Iwan van Eldijk explains how Planon’s solutions help building owners become future-ready.
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Keep up with the rapid pace of digitisation and innovation in the world of real estate & facility management, and learn more about Planon's open platform strategy.
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With the rise of smart building technology, organisations are implementing one-off IoT initiatives to solve a single issue at a time. Read about the value of connecting systems and technologies to a central software platform like an IWMS.
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